Hi Adobe dreamweaver CS4 and Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 are the best editing tools for PHP....Also Joomla is the best content management system with built in templates...where developing, maintaining and updating the website is very easy....

I have been using netbeans for several years.
it can be the best for beginner with features like syntax highlighting, error highlighting, auto completion and few more. and can be best for professional programmers when you need support for CVS versioning, cake php, smarty framework, symphony framework and a very customizable and accessible user interface and several other plugins can be installed. it is free and open source and available for windows, Linux, mac and computer which have a java run time environment(JRE) or java development Kit(JDK).
i have attached a screenshot of netbeans 7.1 under a windows operating system.
just download the jdk from http://www.java.com
and netbeans from http://www.netbeans.org
and test it.

And windows user can also use a unique tool from Microsoft for free. Microsoft web matrix.
the beta2 version of Microsoft offers code auto completion for php, css, javascript, html and most of other softwares like joomla, wordpress, syntax highlighting, ftp (editing remote sites), web deployment, error highlighting, an office 2010 like interface and some others

Last edited by fawadpm on Wed Feb 08, 2012 11:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

my personal favourite is Coda. I tried Textmate for a while but Coda is way more feature rich, although annoyingly it doesn't highlight braces in the way I'd like. Definitely worth the money. Sublime is apparently the next big thing, although it doesn't support 10.5 or lower. Get it while it's in beta! http://www.sublimetext.com/

There are many editors which I tried out, but non of them I had everything what is important to me. Except for 'Netbeans' which I still don't like, because of crappy laptop.

So right now I'm using 'Geany'.
It loads fast, has a folding, line marking, compiling features.
Folding is manual, you can't chose like "Fold all 3rd level folds" like in 'Notepad++', that's annoying, 'cause it was most useful feature to me. Especially since I'm working on new CMS which is based on OOP, it has large classes
Second feature would be text marking. Marks a text which contains same characters - not found on "Geany", but possible on many other editors.
Third most important feature which I didn't find in any editor is CVS. Because of that I end up with using 'Netbeans' for that feature. There even aren't any others programs which would handle CVS well (with GUI, I haven't tried out ones which works on command lines)

What I liked most on 'Geany' is compiling, even thought it was most popular feature I found on most of Linux editors.

Conclusion:
In the end, after comparing pros and cos I encountered. For programming Linux is a crap.
It doesn't have any